Ford’s new BTCC contender
Motorbase Performance has produced an all-new BTCC weapon based on the latest Ford Focus for 2020, and lead driver Rory Butcher is confident it will give him a title shot
Age is just a number, so the saying goes. While it’s often a throwaway comment muttered to play down the frequency with which birthdays come and go, it does ring somewhat true in the British Touring Car Championship. Jason Plato extended his series record to a staggering 97 race wins with victory in the Brands Hatch finale last season. A day short of his 52nd birthday, he became the BTCC’S oldest race winner. On the car front, the FK2 Honda Civic has been on the grid since 2012. As Rory Butcher and Sam Tordoff proved on four occasions last season, the machine is still eminently capable of winning, despite being long in the tooth. Up against the performance balancing measures of ever-changing turbo boost levels, success ballast and partially reversed grids, in its hatchback guise alone the car has amassed 53 race wins. There’s a strong case for the FK2 Civic to be considered the best of the Next Generation Touring Car era.
Time has been far less kind to the Ford Focus, however. Motorbase introduced the Mk3 model in ST form through the 2012 campaign and then refreshed it with an RS variant in 2018,
which spurred Tom Chilton on to rank third in the drivers’ standings. But last year he dropped to 10th with just the sole race win in what was a torrid campaign for the team. Chilton has since departed for BTC Racing, while Motorbase has set to work on a new Focus weapon to roll back the years.
Following the potency of the box-fresh BMW 330i M Sport last season, paddock rumour had it that Motorbase would follow West Surrey Racing’s lead and turn to real-wheel drive. After all, that’s the route Laser Tools Racing pursued by pulling the dust covers off the four-year-old Infiniti Q50 saloon to return it to the grid at Snetterton last August. For Motorbase, there was talk of a Jaguar XE, but its wide bodyshell, courtesy of an all-aluminium construction, wouldn’t have comfortably accommodated a Btcc-spec rollcage. Combined with the squad’s long-standing relationship with Ford engine tuner Mountune, the new front-wheel-drive Mk4 Focus entered the frame.
“We decided that if we were going to try and take on the likes of BMW, Toyota and Honda then we needed to do it with new machinery,” says Motorbase team manager Oly Collins. “Ford have had their car out for a year or so now with the new Focus, but we had a look at a couple of different options. Obviously, we’ve got an engine programme with Mountune that we’ve invested quite heavily in over the years. The only way to carry that over was to use another Ford.”
When you look at a new road-going Focus, it’s easy to spot the lower roof line. That brings an improved centre of gravity and combines nicely with a stiffer chassis. In the industry’s pursuit of ever better efficiency, it’s more slippery too. Perversely, that’s all good news when it comes to burning fuel on the race track.
“We decided Ford had done a lot of work in the last 10 years or so in between the two chassis,” continues Collins. Fundamentally, the new car is 10 years younger. They’ve learned in the road car process as much as we’ve learned in the race team. The new car has a lower centre of gravity, it’s got less frontal area, so in theory it’s more aerodynamic.
“If you look at the modern fleet of cars on the grid – the BMW, the Toyota [Corolla] and the Honda [FK8 Civic Type R] in
“IF WE WERE GOING TO TAKE ON THE LIKES OF BMW, TOYOTA AND HONDA THEN WE NEEDED NEW MACHINERY”
particular – you can see there’s a new breed of car coming. We needed to keep up and Ford has kept up with a new car.”
Motorbase greenlit the project at the end of last October, took delivery of the shells the following month, and the first car was rolling by the beginning of March. Although the returning Andy Neate was still using the old Mk3 RS for the official pre-season test at Silverstone earlier this year, by time the season eventually starts he and team-mates Ollie Jackson and marquee signing Butcher will all have the new machine at their disposal.
“That was another thing that was new to Motorbase,” says Collins, “the amount of CAD work that we used to build the new car. The shell work was all done on CAD. We formed a technical partnership with Custom Cages. It was their first complete build of a touring car. They supply the [roll]cages for pretty much everyone that’s on the grid, but they’ve never done a full shell before.
We worked with them very closely, we had one person full-time involved in the build with Custom Cages fabricating, and our designers and engineers were with them as well. We both had equal input because they’re rollcage and shell specialists, we’re British Touring Car specialists. So we combined the two.”
Under the NGTC regulations, there’s little in the way of a blank sheet of paper. All cars run common Rml-supplied subframes, and Motorbase will continue with its Mountune engines, so the team didn’t go into testing totally blind.
In a time before coronavirus, earlier this year it seemed as though every other weekend Britain was hit by storms, and that meant a lot of wet-weather running. But in the dry, on the Silverstone International configuration during the media day test, Butcher – the breakout star of last season – was fourth fastest in the combined times despite never running the quicker soft tyres. Jackson was 14th, but Neate in the older RS was down in 29th.
“Oh, 100% there’s still pace to unlock,” says Butcher, who returns to Motorbase where he started his BTCC career during a part-time 2017 campaign. “But we’ve got a really good platform that we’re working from. What I would say is that we haven’t quite found the sweet spot in the centre just yet. As a car, it’s one that you jump into and can be on the pace straight away. We just need to push the boundaries a little bit more with the set-up.”
Fortunately, as a three-car attack, once testing resumes and the season gets under way, Motorbase can experiment with settings quickly. When single-entry concern Speedworks Motorsport introduced the new Toyota Corolla last season, the development
was limited by the mileage driver Tom Ingram could do on his own. Motorbase, by contrast, will have triple the data to work from.
Combined with the familiarity of the carried-over parts and the Mk4 Focus’s developments, the team hasn’t muted expectations. “Crikey, we definitely want to beat where we were last year because that was disappointing,” says Collins. “We’re not here to make the numbers up, we’re here to try and win races and win championships. That’s the beauty of the BTCC – it’s possible.
“We’re very aware that it’s our first year with a new car, and we’ll have a bit of a learning year and it’s a case of how quickly we can get on top of it. West Surrey Racing had a brand new car last year and showed us all the way home. Toyota had a brand new car last year and won races and had a pretty good season. So yes, the hope is to be competitive from the start but up against some pretty fierce competition.”
Butcher is also setting his sights high, having exited from AMD Tuning after being crowned the Independent drivers’ champion last season. The 33-year-old Scot will work with race engineer
Rich Benton, who Butcher snapped up on arrival having seen how efficiently he worked with former team-mate Tordoff during his turn at Motorbase in 2018.
“How well the car’s gone in the first few tests, it’s given me confidence that I can realistically score big points early on,” Butcher predicts. “Don’t count me out yet – we’re definitely aiming to be challenging for the drivers’ title!”
As a sign of that ambition, Butcher’s car was laden with success ballast for much of testing in anticipation of carrying a weight penalty throughout the season. What’s more, the team was pleased by how well the Focus took to set-up changes. That suggests a wide operating window, something that has held back the knife-edge FK8 Civic Type R – a machine that’s unbeatable on its day but occasionally fades to the lower reaches of the top 10 with little warning.
Developing an all-new car is a task Motorbase has only done once before – with the outgoing Focus. It’s also a challenge Butcher hasn’t yet faced in his short BTCC career to date. But from where the team ended last season, it had little choice other than to reset the clock.
“THE FIRST FEW TESTS HAVE
GIVEN ME CONFIDENCE THAT I CAN SCORE BIG POINTS EARLY ON”